Mohsin Zaidi
Most large organisations have rebuilt their diversity language faster than they have rebuilt the conditions that make difference safe to disclose. Senior people from minority backgrounds still calibrate what to bring to work, what to suppress, and at what cost to their performance. Leaders need a clearer account of where the gap between stated values and lived experience actually sits, and what closes it.
Mohsin Zaidi is an award-winning author and barrister who helps organisations understand what intersectional identity costs inside elite professional environments, and what genuine inclusion looks like beyond policy.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Mohsin Zaidi
- He speaks about inclusion from inside the institutions that struggle most with it: the English Bar, the UK Supreme Court, magic-circle law, and a global strategic advisory firm. The argument carries because the credentials are the audience’s own.
- A Dutiful Boy is the only memoir to win both the Lambda Literary Award and the Polari First Book Prize while also being named Book of the Year by The Guardian, GQ and New Statesman. That literary standing changes how a corporate audience receives a personal story.
- His subject is the specific friction between social mobility, faith, race and sexuality, not a single identity strand. Useful for organisations whose inclusion conversations have plateaued on single-axis framing.
- He has done the unglamorous work alongside the writing: trustee of Stonewall, former board member of London Pride, named on The Lawyer Hot 100 and the FT future LGBT leaders list. The advocacy is institutional, not performative.
- He translates lived experience into questions a leadership team can act on, particularly on mental health stigma in ethnic minority communities, where most corporate wellbeing programmes are weakest.
Biography highlights
- Author of A Dutiful Boy (Penguin, 2020), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Polari First Book Prize.
- Book of the Year selections from The Guardian, GQ, New Statesman and Attitude.
- BA Law with European Legal Studies, Keble College, Oxford; qualified as a solicitor at Linklaters and a New York attorney.
- Judicial Assistant to Lord Sumption and Lord Wilson at the UK Supreme Court; criminal barrister at 6 King’s Bench Walk.
- Management consultant at Hakluyt & Company since 2021.
- Trustee of Stonewall; Financial Times top future LGBT leader; The Lawyer Hot 100.
Biography
Walthamstow to Keble College, Oxford was the first improbable journey. Linklaters, then the UK Supreme Court as Judicial Assistant to Lord Sumption and Lord Wilson, then the criminal Bar at 6 King’s Bench Walk, were the next. The institutions Mohsin Zaidi passed through are the same institutions that most struggle to retain people who look and sound like him.
A Dutiful Boy, published by Penguin in 2020, is the memoir of how those journeys actually felt from the inside. It won the Lambda Literary Award and the Polari First Book Prize, and was named Book of the Year by The Guardian, GQ, New Statesman and Attitude. The literary reception matters because it sets the register: this is not a corporate diversity talk dressed up as a story.
The argument Zaidi makes to organisations is narrow and useful. Single-axis inclusion frameworks (race, or class, or sexuality, or faith) miss what most people from minority backgrounds actually carry into work, which is the interaction effect. He is direct on mental health stigma inside ethnic minority communities, an area corporate wellbeing programmes routinely under-serve. He is a trustee of Stonewall and a former board member of London Pride, so the institutional knowledge sits alongside the personal one.
Since 2021 he has been a management consultant at Hakluyt & Company, alongside his writing and advocacy. The combination is what makes the work travel into senior commercial rooms: he is asking the same questions the partners and executives in front of him are asking, from a position that takes their context seriously.
Key speaking topics
- Intersectionality at work
- Social mobility in professional services
- Mental health stigma in ethnic minority communities
- LGBTQ+ inclusion in conservative cultures
- Race, faith and workplace identity
- Belonging and authenticity in elite institutions
Ideal for
- CHROs, heads of D&I and culture leads at professional services firms
- Law firm and financial services leadership audiences working on retention of minority talent
- ERGs, Pride networks and multicultural networks at large corporates
- Executive committees reviewing the substance, rather than the optics, of their inclusion programmes
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of how race, faith, class and sexuality interact in the daily experience of minority staff.
- Specific language for talking about mental health in communities where the topic is stigmatised.
- A sharper sense of why retention of senior minority talent stalls in firms that recruit well.
- Permission for senior leaders to engage personal identity as a leadership question, not a compliance one.